Championing its open-source philosophy, Ultimaker has made these files available in a bid to learn from, understand and share ideas with the 3D printing community. By turning its audience into a development partner, Ultimaker expects to learn and understand the best ways to improve its product and deliver what the customer wants.

“Ultimaker is committed to sharing new designs, functions and updates with our customers to give them the freedom to 3D print to the best of their ability,” explained Siert Wijnia, founder of Ultimaker. “Being open source enables quick iterations and innovation which pushes the boundaries of the impossible every time. It means our innovations are community-powered and the focus lies not only on what we think is important, but also allow our users to grow and transform with us as we develop new technology.”

Making its machine files public is something the company has done for each of its printers from, choosing to make the files public around six months after each release. Speaking with Ultimaker at TCT Show + Personalize last month, Paul Croft from the UK-arm of the company, explained how Ultimaker strongly believes openness and collaboration are the key components the 3D printing industry needs in order to move forward.

“For me it’s more the philosophy, this open source collaborative idea, looking to seed open innovation differentiates us from other people. We believe that to get to where we all want to be in the 3D printing industry then we need to collaborate and try and develop as best we can, the software, the hardware and filament side of things but that involves a lot of collaboration.”